By:Jeff Lipton
South Island Industries Inc., a construction and debris recycling plant, currently operating at 2 Rason Road in Inwood, recently bought the barge-accessible waterfront property at 1 Sheridan Blvd. Details of the deal were not immediately available.
The new owners have gone right to work, preparing to clean up the environmental mess left behind by Eagle Oil, which was fined a record $3.5 million in July 1998 after the company racked up 97 major violations in a four-year period. Eagle Oil was ranked the sixth-worst polluter in New York and New Jersey from 1995 to 1998, and the state ordered the facility to shut down.
The oil company received 30 violations for discharging a toxic chemical, which was released into Mott Basin, a regulated tidal wetland, in excess of the limits established by the state. At times it produced a petroleum sheen on the basin. Eagle Oil accumulated numerous wetlands violations, and contamination on the property has remained there until now.
South Island recycles concrete, asphalt and other debris for use in construction projects. The state Department of Environmental Conservation met with the prospective owners at the end of last year to discuss remediation options and a sub-surface investigation that must be completed before the property can be purchased, said Bill Fonda, a DEC spokesman. The new owners, Fonda said, would be responsible for cleaning up the mess before any business activity could take place on the site.
The DEC would supervise the cleanup of the site and the oil spills around the terminals, said Fonda. Soil samples would be taken. It-s a limited area. I don-t know if it would require additional work or things of that nature.
Although the owners of South Island could not be reached for comment, a worker who answered the phone at the Rason Road facility said, They closed on the property a while ago. They are over there working on it and cleaning it up now.
General cleanup of the property has been ongoing, Fonda said. They are straightening up around the property, he said. That doesn-t mean they are necessarily cleaning up the oil contamination just yet.
Fonda said that DEC officials plan to meet with South Island owners in the future to work out a plan for cleaning up the oil.
Neighbors said they are glad to see that someone has come in and plans to clean up the contaminated site, which has lain dormant since Eagle Oil left in the late 1990s.
Once the site is cleaned up, South Island may have to go before the Town of Hempstead Board of Zoning Appeals for any variances it will require to operate a business there.
In the meantime, the Planning and Zoning Committee of the Inwood Civic Association has pledged to work closely with the new owners to assist them in making a smooth transition and resolve any concerns in the Inwood community. So it will be mutually in our best interests to see the blighted eyesore cleaned up, said one member of the civic association-s planning and zoning committee. As the ÔGateway to the Five Towns,- it would be a great benefit to the Inwood community to see the area cleaned up and made as aesthetically pleasing to the eye as possible.
The largest benefit to the community is that the Eagle Oil site will be cleaned up and once again become commercially productive.
In addition to Eagle Oil-s being shut down by the state and the fines levied on the company, owner William S. Nappo was sentenced to 21 months in prison in February 2002 for conspiring to defraud the U.S. of more than $1.3 million in motor fuel excise taxes on diesel fuel. After his release from prison, he will be subject to three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay back the $1.3 million to the federal government.
After Eagle Oil was shut down by the state and the owner was jailed, squatters used the property, residents said. They said they saw about 10 trailers and up to 20 squatters on the land.
Residents also feared that if the property were left abandoned, it could easily have been converted into a brownfield site, an abandoned or underutilized parcel of land where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by actual or perceived environmental contamination.
